Rail Station Ends Trip From Ruin to Renewal

By PAUL GOLDBERGER, Special to the New York Times

Published: September 29, 1988

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26—
In an age in which factories are being converted into condominiums and schools into shopping malls, Washington is about to inaugurate what may be the most daring transformation of a historic structure yet - the conversion of its spectacular, 81-year-old train station back into a train station.

The building is Union Station, designed by Daniel Burnham as if it were the gateway to an imperial city. It was stripped of its railroad functions in the 1970's when the National Park Service spent more than $100 million to turn the vast Beaux-Arts terminal into the National Visitors Center.

The plan proved misguided. So few visitors went to the center, which was opened in time for the bicentennial celebrations in 1976, that it was shut down two years later, one of Washington's major embarrassments. Toadstools Inside

Since train travelers had already been shunted into a cramped replacement station of cinder block that Amtrak erected beside the historic building, the gray granite station, with its three huge entrance arches flanked by Ionic columns and topped by monumental statuary, was simply left to languish. By 1981 it had sunk so far into physical ruin that rain caused portions of the roof to collapse onto the marble floor and toadstools to grow inside the great barrel-vaulted room that is the station's main hall.

But at noon Thursday it reopens, not only Washington's most notable architectural phoenix but also, at a cost of more than $160 million, one of the most ambitious historic-preservation efforts in the country.

The first train travelers are scheduled to move through the station Friday, as Amtrak's new ticket offices open and the cinder-block station closes. More than 2,000 people were invited to celebrate the restoration at a black-tie, candlelit dinner Wednesday night under the ornate, arched ceiling of the station's main hall to benefit the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Nine Movie Theaters

The delay of train service until Friday is intended to give a one-day head start to another phase of the project, a three-level marketplace of shops and restaurants that fills most of the 640-foot-long glass-roofed concourse that runs behind the station's grand halls.

The shopping complex, which will eventually be expanded to include 110 stores, numerous restaurants and nine movie theaters, is the centerpiece of a plan by a private real-estate development group to turn the station into an economically self-sufficient operation.

The new Union Station is one of the most sweeping attempts anywhere to pay for the restoration of a landmark building through the addition of new, profit-making functions.

The complex is envisioned as a blend of pure architectural restoration and the projects, often called festival marketplaces, that have injected fashionable stores and restaurants into historic quarters of other downtowns around the country. A somewhat similar complex was opened in 1986 in St. Louis's Romanesque train station, but Washington's Union Station is notable in that the trains, and not the shops, are the project's primary reason for being. 'As It Always Was'

''The retail is just here to support the railroad station,'' said Philip Loheed, project manager for Benjamin Thompson & Associates, the architectural firm based in Cambridge, Mass., that designed the new retail space. ''This is not supposed to be a fake place. The goal is to make Union Station a real working part of the city as it always was.''

According to Amtrak, the cinder-block box that replaced Union Station for the last decade became the nation's third busiest passenger railroad terminal, serving 8.5 million passengers a year on Amtrak, commuter railroads and the Washington subway system.

Amtrak itself contributed $70 million of the project's total cost, which was used to of restore the old terminal's architecture and to return the building to train use. In addition, Amtrak agreed to move its national headquarters, situated nearby, into office space inside the station. #90-Foot Pit Much of the restoration work, which was overseen by the architectural firm of Harry Weese & Associates, involved undoing the remnants of the visitors center, which not only failed to attract tourists but destroyed much of the original structure as well.

The most conspicuous aspect of the costly conversion of the building into the visitors center was a huge pit cut into the center of the floor of the terminal's 90-foot-high main hall and outfitted for a slide show of Washington's tourist attractions. But few tourists, it turned out, wanted to travel to the edge of Washington to sit in a hole cut into the floor of a landmark building so they could look at slides of the attractions they could actually see by going just outside the door.

The pit quickly became a symbol of the center's failure and showed the extent to which the architectural integrity of the station had been violated. One of the first orders of business for the contractors working on the restoration was to cover it up. #2 Years of Negotiation The project's combination of architectural restoration and profit-making real estate development was formulated and financed as the result of a 1981 act of Congress, introduced by several senators, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In 1983 the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation was formed by the Department of Transportation to carry out the requirement of the legislation and to devise an economically viable program for restoring the station.

The corporation requested proposals from private real-estate developers and in 1984 selected Union Station Venture, a consortium made up of the development firms of La Salle Partners of Chicago and Williams Jackson Ewing of Baltimore and the Benjamin Thompson architectural firm.

It took more than two years - as long as construction of the new station would take - to negotiate the terms of the agreements among the developers, the Restoration Corporation and the Department of Transportation.

The project also includes a five-level, 1,300-car garage behind the station over the railroad tracks, an addition conceived back in the days of the visitors center but never built. The garage is expected to help attract suburban shoppers and residents of other parts of Washington to the complex, which is at the edge of Capitol Hill and several blocks east of the city's main retail, office and entertainment centers.

While the station is now clearly Washington's major transportation hub, it remains somewhat isolated from those parts of the city that easily support its type of fashionable shops and restaurants. And Washington already has numerous other shopping malls with the same kind of shops that are moving into Union Station, such as Ann Taylor, the Limited, and the Nature Company.

On the other hand, none of them are in the kind of environment of Union Station, which is something like having three levels of shops off the rotunda of the Capitol. And the city has no other place like Union Station, which now, after its refurbishment is arguably the nation's grandest train terminal.

Photos of the main concourse of newly renovated Union Station (NYT/Paul Hosefros); part of a winding staircase in Union Station (pg. B9) (NYT/Paul Hosefros)